And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 181.

It's titled The Foundations of Confidence.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

How are you holding up, boys and girls and everybody in between? It's been an odd couple of weeks,

isn't it? And it's probably going to be odd for a little bit longer yet. Is odd an understatement? I think it really is. But because

these podcast episodes all sit on the internet forever in a day, I don't want to go on too much

about the corona situation at the minute. If you're listening to this in the future

anyway, then you already know more about it than I do, and you aren't that interested

anymore. And if you're listening to this on its release, then there's enough stuff out there

already. And although it's a big part of everybody's life right now, personal development

and mental health issues don't stop.

Needing to be inspired, educated and motivated doesn't stop, just because we can't go within six feet of each other.

So I want to kind of put it all to one side to a degree and talk about confidence today.

Crops up a lot in the therapy room and I do get a lot of emails from listeners

asking about it because it's a tricky subject. And it's tricky because it's so big.

What is confidence to one person is arrogance to somebody else and someone can be confident

but still be anxious in certain situations.

So it's quite hard to actually define what confidence really is.

And that's why we pick it apart in therapy sometimes

and work out what it is that people really need

because we can't only rely on the dictionary's definition of confidence, although we do

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